Other Books

Marxism Today Special: Wrong

Martin Jacques

Over seven years after the closure of Marxism Today, the team reconvened to produce a special 40,000-word issue devoted to a critique of Blair and the so-called ‘Blair project’.

As the title suggests, it was extremely negative.

New Times: Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s

Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques

Lawrence and Wishart, 1989

Marxism Today established itself in the last five years of the 1980s as Britain’s foremost political monthly. Its reputation was consolidated by its brilliant analysis of Thatcherism – a term pioneered by Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques.

The magazine has now moved on to an analysis of New Times – the fundamental political, economic and cultural restructuring that has taken place in the last decade or so throughout Western Europe and North America. More recently the accelerating pace of change in Eastern Europe has set in motion a political dynamic whose outcome is as hard to predict as that in the West.

The profound changes which have occurred redrew the political map – and the new terrain has so far been more propitious for the right than for the left. The essays gathered in this collection are beginning to chart the new landscape, and to outline a politics for the 1990s.

New Times is an agenda-setting collection which has important implications not just for Western socialism, but for any serious consideration of the future of politics.

The Politics of Thatcherism

Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques

Lawrence and Wishart, 1983

Thatcherism has shattered the consensus of post-war British Politics – the gentle swing of the pendulum between alternating Labour and Tory administrations. Marxism Today began an analysis of the trend in Britain towards authoritarian populism before Thatcher herself was elected in 1979, and in the years following, continued to provide the most original and definitive discussion of this breaking of the mould of British politics.

This book brings together articles from Marxism Today – all of them revised, updated or expanded – which look at the background to the emergence of Thatcherism, its consequences for the British economy and people – including the Falklands war – and its long term impacts on other political forces. Providing the most complete analysis of contemporary British politics now available, the contributors to this volume cover every aspect of Thatcherism – from the crisis of world capitalism which provides its backdrop to the dismantlement of the welfare state, from the shockwaves it has sent through the labour movement to its impact on women.

The Forward March of Labour Halted?

Martin Jacques and Francis Mulhern

New Left Books, 1981

When Eric Hobsbawm’s lecture entitled ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’ was published in Marxism Today in September 1978, it provoked huge controversy. Hobsbawm argued the labour movement was in decline which, at the time, was close to heresy for many people on the left. Hobsbawm’s original lecture is the subject of this book, together with many responses and a reply by Hobsbawm to his critics. It was one of the most influential articles ever published in Marxism Today and proved a turning point in how the left perceived itself.